


Just nothing

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-14
Updated: 2012-03-14
Packaged: 2017-11-01 22:59:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/362203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock is gone, John doesn't want to believe it. He returns to 221b Baker Street after the funeral.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just nothing

**Author's Note:**

> My first work published here, I hope you like it xD...English is not my native language, so please excuse some mistakes, I tried my best.

When he was younger, John Watson had a weakness for poems. He read a lot of Shakespeare, Shelley, all those old masters of poetry. He was particularly fond of love poems. There was something within those words that fascinated him, even though he could never explain what exactly it was. He had never been a very sentimental person and the unconditional commitment of people willing to die for each other almost got him addicted.  
Dying appeared to him far less frightful if it was for somebody one loved and this had been one of the main reasons for him to go to war. Nowhere else he had experienced this incredible feeling of standing for something bigger than himself.  
Not until he met Sherlock.  
Now, many years later, John Watson realised that the poets had been wrong. He was standing at the funeral of a man that had meant more to him than words could ever have expressed and he felt NOTHING.  
No burning pain, not even the desire to kill himself. Just nothing.  
He saw the men in their black suits wearing a fake expression of grief and the women in their long, black dresses, sobbing artificially into their handkerchiefs. There seemed to be some kind of competition as to who was able to cram as many grandiloquent adjectives like “extraordinary”, “amazing” or “magnificent” into a sentence.  
John knew that this would have meant nothing for Sherlock.  
Sherlock would have looked at them once and then told John their whole life stories and John would have giggled cautiously and they would have earned disapproving looks. All this won’t ever happen again.  
John forced himself to think like this. You will never see him again. You will never talk to him again. He will never solve a case again.  
John felt nothing.  
To be honest, John did not even understand why he was here. Sherlock wouldn’t have cared. Sherlock didn’t care. Sherlock was dead.  
John wandered around aimlessly through the crowd, was stopped by people (most of them complete strangers to John) who offered them their “deepest sympathy”. Their sympathy meant nothing to John and won’t bring Sherlock back.  
And then John saw Mycroft. He was standing alone at the very end of the little cemetery, wearing a black suit and his old umbrella. He looked almost as usual, for he wasn’t crying, but standing as stiff as ever.  
But in his eyes, there was the same emptiness John knew was in his own.  
Mycroft and Sherlock always had something of a difficult relationship, but were united by their shared genius and their roles as their own kind of outcasts in society. John knew that Sherlock had been the most important person in Mycroft’s life.  
Without hesitating, John went over to see him.

But when he was standing in front of him, John didn’t know what to say. He knew Mycroft didn’t care for his sympathy as he didn’t care for Mycroft’s.  
And still there was some kind of bond between them, Sherlock, and the loss of him.  
Mycroft looked at John.  
“John.” He said. John nodded. “Mycroft.”  
Suddenly, there was nothing left to say. For a while, they were standing next to each other in silence, until they could not bear it any longer because in this silence there was Sherlock.  
He was in the way Mycroft bend his head and in his hands. It was the first time that John noticed the similarities.  
He was in John’s watch that had accompanied them on so many cases (Sherlock never carried a watch of his own).  
And all of a sudden, he was so terribly missing and not there that John couldn’t breathe. He closed his eyes and sighed. Then he felt Mycroft’s hands on his shoulders. The touch lacked sympathy for Mycroft was lost too deep in his own grief, it was helpless and awkward but it showed John that he wasn’t entirely alone in this Sherlock-less world.  
John looked up and nodded again, finding no words to express what he was feeling.  
Then he turned around and fled from the scene.  
His numbness returned.

 

As he was sitting in his cab, he realised that he didn’t believe in Sherlock’s death. Everything had been so surreal and fast that it just could not be REAL.  
Sherlock was far too smart to just die.  
How often had he cheated death before?  
The further they drove through London, the more John started to believe that it all had just been one of Sherlock’s famous bluffs.  
Sherlock would wait at home and explain everything. (He had to.)  
John was clinging onto that thought and felt the numbness going away. Sherlock was alive; because there was just no way that this funeral had been the end of the most extraordinary man the world had ever seen.  
Hadn’t John read all those poems that said once someone’s soul mate died, the remaining one would feel terrible pain? But there had been nothing; John had felt nothing, so thoroughly nothing even though he never doubted that Sherlock was his soul mate.  
This was the proof. Sherlock was alive. He just COULD NOT be dead.  
As the carriage came to stand in front of the brick building that was Baker Street 221, John was absolutely sure. He wondered what kind of explanation Sherlock would have.

John opened the door and the scent was so familiar (he’d spent the last nights at his sister Harriet’s because he couldn’t bear coming here), so much more real then the nightmare that had been the last few days, and so SHERLOCK that it confirmed what John already was certain of. Sherlock was here.  
Oh, that bastard! That wonderful, lovely bastard! How could he do this to John?  
John ran up the stairs and finally opened the door to apartment B.  
“Sherlock!” he shouted.  
And nobody answered.  
This was what John hadn’t expected. Suddenly, there was doubt in the back of his mind.  
Don’t even think like this, John told himself. He’s surely working on one of these stupid experiments of his and has gotten so carried away that he can’t hear you. You know him, he is like that. Or maybe…maybe he’s just fallen asleep, the past days must have been hard for him too, whatever he was doing.  
But when John shouted his name a second time, his voice was shaking.  
And nobody answered.  
John couldn’t take it any longer. He stormed into every room of their apartment. And Sherlock wasn’t there.  
Then, John entered Sherlock’s bedroom. A part of him knew that Sherlock wouldn’t be there, either, but a big, desperate part of him was holding on to this one last hope as if his life depended on it. (It did).  
But nothing could have prepared him for what he found there, on those white sheets that Sherlock had slept on so often.  
It was a thin layer of dust.


End file.
